My mother (in a fluster, entering the sitting-room to welcome the couple): I’m so sorry, but Punch has been kept up in town after all.
The Doc (sniffing the air): Does Avery smoke your husband’s cigars?
My mother (vague and exhausted): I really don’t know. Do you smoke Mr. Ackerley’s cigars, Avery?
The butler (an astute young man): Yes’m, of course.
The Doc (sourly gaining one end if he had lost another): Then you can give me one after dinner, if you can spare it.
With the passage of time, the deterioration in his physical condition and the gradual onset of locomotor ataxia, which affected his gait, my father’s habits altered though they remained regular. He began to breakfast at home and, abandoning his walk to the station, took taxis instead. Those were the days of his taxi-driver, Mickey. Later still he gave up the train too and was driven to and from Bow Street every day in a private hire car owned by a Mr. Morland, a local man we had known for years. Before turning over to cars he had been an ostler with a stable of horses on which, as children, we used to ride in Richmond Park. His monthly bill must have been terrific, and we wondered why my father did not buy a car instead, for we regarded him as a wealthy man, but when we suggested this he would say mildly that he couldn’t afford it—a remark we never took seriously. On his return in Mr. Morland’s car, he would still bring with him the frequent little presents for my mother, exotic fruits such as mangoes or avocado pears, marrons glacés of which she was fond, whatever he knew would please her; her birthdays and their anniversaries were never forgotten but marked by something more expensive, a piece of jewelry or a bottle of “Jicky,” her favorite perfume. Journeys to the Midlands were all given up; the only large break in his routine now was an annual month’s holiday to Bad Gastein in Austria, a famous spa where he took the cure. For his jumps, now largely controlled by drugs, were not his only physical trouble, his blood pressure was high, he had developed a paunch and a liver, and the good living in which he indulged was not the prescribed regime for reducing any of them. He was a connoisseur of wines with a well-stocked cellar; of claret, burgundy, and port he was specially fond, and often when I dined with him my opinion on some new vintage he had just laid down was requested. “Do you think I’m getting too fond of my stomach?” he once asked me; a touching question from father to son.
From my notebooks. Dr. Wadd to my mother:
“Next to me at the banquet was an old man with a nose like a glow-worm and eyeballs that throbbed like that, and all he could say was ‘What’s it to be, old boy?’ or ‘What’ll we have for our faces now?’ He looked about half-an-hour in front of an apopolectic fit. So I said to him, ‘Hadn’t you better take a pull, old bean?’ ‘What?’ he said, gulping down his seventh brandy. Then I told him and he got frightened. ‘What ought I to do?’ he asks. ‘Go home to bed and take a Seidlitz Powder,’ I says, ‘and live on nothing but hot water for a few days.’ Gawd! You should have seen his face!
That’s how they all go, these chaps, gorging themselves into that sort of state, coming to you with a blood pressure of about 300, and when you’ve got’ em into the safety zone again, off they buzz on the same game and back they come. Look at old Edward the Seventh. Bottle of champagne with his lunch, another with his dinner, all his food cooked in oil, wouldn’t go anywhere unless he could get his particular brand of brandy, sitting up gorging till three in the morning—then he’d come to us, diabetic, dropsy in the feet, lungs under water to about here, kidneys like walnuts, a neck out to here, plush pockets under his eyes, and every breath like drawing a cork. That’s what he was like, and we’d feed him on dog-biscuits and gruel and decarbonize him—then off he’d go again. It’s the same with old Rog. You’ve got to take him off his wines and brandy, cut out as much meat as possible, and keep him quiet—he’s got veins like gas-pipes and they get brittle. His cerebration’s all right, good as mine, but if he gets an apoplectic fit, it’ll be all up with him. But it’s no use talking to men like that; with their livers flapping against their insteps they listen for about five minutes, and as soon as they feel the least bit better, over the top they go!”
Poor Mother! She tried, in her anxious, ineffectual way to restrain my father; port at last had to be renounced, but all attempts to wean him from his clarets failed. Once, after a fright, she begged Wadd to speak seriously to him:
Wadd: Rog, old bean, if you gave up that rotten old claret of yours I could promise you another ten years of life.
My father: Thanks. I’d sooner have the claret.
which sent Wadd into one of his squealing, leg-slapping bouts of laughter. However, the Bad Gastein treatment was certainly effective, my father would return appreciably slimmer and better in health—then start to grow a paunch and liver again. My mother never accompanied him on these journeys; she had already begun, in the mid-’twenties, that nervous withdrawal from the hazardous outside world which was in the end to confine her to her house like a squirrel in a cage. On one of his last visits to Bad Gastein, when his gait was getting very groggy, I remember feeling sorry for my old father going off on holiday all by himself and asked him if he would like me to go with him. He seemed surprised and rather disconcerted; it was very kind of me, he said gruffly, but he could get on perfectly well alone.
In view of all this it may be thought excusable never to have considered whether this man in his late fifties might still possess virility; the fact that women and sex were often in his thought in the form of the smoking-room story, one of which I have recounted, and in other jocularities, was easily written off as a compensation, the reminiscent after-glow of a lost libido, that substitute amusement in the old for actions they are no longer able to perform. It was when I returned home after the war, at the age of twenty-two, that I was judged old and worldly enough to share in this kind of entertainment which my father and his associates enjoyed—the telling of “yarns,” as he called them. He loved these yarns and would chuckle and chortle over them like the “naughty boy” my mother sometimes called him, spinning them out, as time went on, to interminable lengths to delay, for as long as possible, the familiar or foreseen conclusion, savoring the smutty joke with relish as he savored his old brandy. To my young mind these yarns were seldom good and never single; one of them always reminded him or his cronies of another; they seemed to adhere together in their sexual fluid like flies in treacle, and whenever I lunched with him, Stockley and his other colleagues in his office dining-room in Bow Street, the yarn-spinning, once it had started, which it generally did the moment we sat down to table, would go on almost non-stop, each dirty story being instantly capped by an even dirtier one from someone else. At first I thought these stories perfectly disgusting, as also the terms my father habitually employed for the sexual act: to “poke,” to “screw,” to “roger”; and his word for the male organ, “tool”; but I got used to them at last, laughed heartily with the rest—though I felt a transparent impostor in that I never had any to contribute myself—and even egged my father on to tell the “latest” when we were alone, I saw he enjoyed them so much. They formed the atmosphere of good-fellowship—atmosphere, I fear was all it had—in which he and his friends lived, seemed, indeed, the only kind of non-professional social intercourse in which most of them were able to engage. “Rog, old lad,” Dr. Wadd would chirrup, dashing into the house in his smart patent-leather, suede-panelled boots, a carnation in the button-hole of his loud check suit, “I’ve just heard a good ‘un, had to drop in and tell you,” and drawing my father aside (if there were ladies present) he would impart in a whisper, punctuated with squirts and squeaks of mirth, the latest yarn before rushing off in his car to perform some urgent operation. I used often to wonder what could be the source of this extraordinary folklore, this large oral pornographic “literature,” these businessmen’s ballads. Who invented the things? Are they still going the rounds? Some of them were quite elaborate, almost short stories: surely the strangest example of anonymous art.
All this t
ittering and gloating in the lavatories of sex belonged, then, in my thought to the same compensatory category as an actual London lavatory about which my father used to chuckle. This lavatory, said he, was very popular because there were mirrors in the urinals so placed that stout old gentlemen like himself were able to view and admire their own “tools,” otherwise out of sight beneath the bulge of their bellies.
11
I HAD TEN years in which to get to know my father, that is to say as man to man: 1919 to 1929, the year of his death, and I was at home in Richmond for only a portion of that period. Soon after my repatriation, in almost skeletal shape, for I had nearly succumbed in Switzerland to the Spanish grippe and was still convalescing there when the war ended, I studied with a crammer for Little-go, in which I had failed in 1914, defeated by Paley’s Evidences of Christianity. Easements were now granted to those whose education the war had interrupted; I passed muster and went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1919.
After four years of active service and incarceration and at the age of twenty-three I did not enjoy it much, though why I should begin my sentence like that as if I were providing reasons for discontent I don’t know. Throughout my time there I lived in digs in Bridge Street; I believe I did eventually have the chance of rooms in my college, Magdalene, and did not bother to take them. Had I done so, perhaps I should have a stronger sense of having belonged to the place. As it is, I recollect very little about my Cambridge years. I felt unsettled, restless, purposeless; I wasted my time. For some reason, or no reason— how the extraordinary choice came to be made I can’t recall—I took up the study of Law with the notion of becoming a barrister. My father, who already cherished the highest and proudest opinion of my mental abilities (he used to say that I could always do better than anyone else whatever I set my mind to), enthusiastically paid my dues at the Inner Temple and boasted among his friends that the future of the Woolsack was assured. In fact reading Law, dry though it was, did not entirely bore me, I was interested in the criminal side of it, and even labored through immense tomes such as Williams on Real Property, Williams on Torts, with intelligence and was well thought of by my tutor. But my mind was only partly engaged and the confidence in myself I did not ever share with my father began to fail; I was far too slow-witted and ruminative a man, it seemed to me, to make a successful barrister, I took only half my tripos in Law, idly turning over for the rest to English Literature—a subject we can all study for ourselves in our spare time without the need for academic instruction. Throughout my school days and Army days I had written verse; I continued to do so in Cambridge and some of it found publication in one or two periodicals and in a volume called Poems by Four Authors; a three-act play, The Prisoners of War, which I had written in Switzerland and completely recast at home before I went up, was thought to be unproducible and lay in a drawer. I emerged from Cambridge therefore with an inglorious BA degree, a handful of verses, and some lifelong friends.
Vacations had been spent with my parents in Richmond, where I had a bedroom and a large pleasant study lined with books at the top of the house. When I came down in the spring of 1921, and when I was not travelling abroad, I lived there for two or three years until I started to establish myself in various parts of London. I was now set to be a writer, and my Father no doubt made an easy displacement of the Lord Chancellor for the Poet Laureate. My study was understood to be private ground where the Great Mind could meditate undisturbed. But write I could not and during this immediate post-Cambridge period that I spent at home I became more and more fretful and frustrated, more and more persecuted—though the only person who persecuted me was myself. I had every material comfort; my sister bequeathed me her car when she went off to Panama to engage herself to an American businessman whom she married in 1926; my father was giving me an allowance of £350 a year, a substantial sum in those days; he never interfered with me in any way and seldom asked questions. His feeling for me may be seen in a short letter he wrote me during my last term at Cambridge:
“My dear lad,
I asked Nancy [my sister] last night whether you were really hard up and I gathered that you were. Now I want you to drop me a line and let me know if you ever find funds running low, as all I have is at your disposal as you ought to know and there need never be reservations between us. My faith in you is as my affection for you and knows no bounds.
Your old Dad.”
No son could ever have received from his father a sweeter letter than that; how saddening it is to read it now. The very boundlessness of his faith in me contributed, as time went on, to my anxiety. For I could not write, and if he did ask questions on his return from his office in the evenings: “Well, old boy, what have you been doing today?” I felt ashamed and evasive, for I had done nothing; if he did not ask questions, I was equally worried by his silence: did he think me a “loafer?” This, as I have said, was one of his favorite words of contempt for idle, shiftless people, and although I don’t now believe he ever applied it in his thoughts to me, I applied it in what I feared to be his thoughts to myself. Had I known then that he had been something of a loafer in his own youth, down at The Cell Farm and throughout his connection with the Burckhardts I daresay I should have felt better, but my knowledge of his past life at the time was of the sketchiest. As it was I lived in a constant state of restlessness and self-consciousness. Much was expected of me, nothing was accomplished. I kept desultory notebooks in which I jotted down ideas for works that never got written, I tried my hand at short stories, macabre and in the most clotted manner of Henry James, I began a verse-play about Galeazzo Maria Sforza, a fifteenth-century Milanese despot who was eventually assassinated by two young friends in the cathedral porch for his perversions and abominable cruelties. But I seemed unable to concentrate and got hopelessly stuck in everything I attempted. Trips abroad did nothing to stimulate creative thought. I went to Jamaica on one of my father’s boats, travelling en prince with a Cambridge friend of mine; I visited France, Italy, Jugoslavia; I spent five months in India (1923–1924) as companion to a maharajah and brought back a journal of my stay; whenever I was home again my neuroses returned. I remember that when I reached our front door on my return from India and was about to insert my key in the lock, I suddenly thought, “Oh hell! What am I doing? I could have stayed longer in India had I wished. What on earth have I come back for?”
It would be false, however, to give the impression that I was entirely miserable. I enjoyed, I am sure, a good deal of my life. But there was always, underlying everything, this fret in my mind about not knowing where I was going, not being able to get on. I felt guilty. I felt guilty when I spoke unkindly to my mother for tapping timidly upon my sacred study door as she sometimes did, though she interrupted nothing, for there was nothing to interrupt. I felt guilty at lying abed in the morning when my father went off to his office at eight, and in the evening, when he wanted his game of bridge and I was needed for a fourth, I felt trapped. I had spent a good deal of my captivity in Germany and Switzerland playing cards to pass the time and had become something of an expert; now that I was “free” I wished never to see a card again. I often played grudgingly, therefore, or even rebelled, depriving my father of his game and afterwards feeling a cad for having done so. I did not discuss my troubles with him, I had other and intimate friends, intellectuals like myself, in whom I confided, but if he did not actually realize what was going on, that I was getting nowhere with my self-appointed tasks, he saw I was discontented and bored, as my sister also, when she was on the scene, was discontented and bored, and this saddened him I am sure, it saddened him that in spite of all the advantages he had afforded us, advantages which, in his own upbringing, he had gone without, expensive education, money, freedom, leisure, we should seem at odds with this “wonderful old world.”
There was, in fact, an extra awkwardness in the way of my consulting him, had I ever wanted to do so; I had an uneasy feeling that he was rather hoping I would decide to join him in his business in place o
f my dead brother. Indeed, should I not actually offer myself, since I seemed unable to do anything else, to this important, proud concern, with its large fleet of steamers, which he had built up out of nothing, and in which the sons of his partner and colleagues were already being enrolled? He would be pleased if I did, no doubt. Yet he never, by so much as a hint, sought to influence me to such a course; the worry lay entirely in my own nervous anxiety. In fact I recall that someone else suggested such a solution while we were at table: “Why don’t you take a job with your Dad?” and he saved my face by answering off-handedly for me, “Joe isn’t interested in bananas.” The only time he ever mentioned the matter, so far as I remember, was when I joined the BBC in 1928, at the invitation of the Talks Department (my unmarketable play had by then been published and produced, and I was a “coming” man) on a salary of £350 a year; he then said mildly, thinking only of the cash, that if I’d ever thought of entering Elders and Fyffes I would have been started off at twice that figure. However, I never seriously thought of offering myself to him; I disliked his partner, Arthur Stockley, and despised jobs. My father’s way of life, the commuting life, the regular habit, the daily papers in the same morning and evening trains, the same “cheerio” travelling acquaintances, the passing on of the latest smutty story, and the cheap satisfaction of being recognized and saluted by guards, ticket-collectors, porters and taxi-men upon the way, seemed to me contemptible, death in life. No, freedom for me! Yet, in 1928, this, so far as routine went, was the way of life I chose and imprisoned myself in for thirty years.
My Father and Myself Page 9
